Black House by Stephen King Page B

. . .
    “He listens,” Dale mutters, and gets up. He heads for the back door, then returns for his briefcase. He’ll put it in the back seat of his cruiser before he waters the flower beds. He doesn’t want those awful pictures in his house any longer than strictly necessary.
    He listens.
    Like the way he’d listened to Janna Massengale, the bartender at the Taproom. Dale had had no idea why Jack was spending so much time with the little chippy; it had even crossed his mind that Mr. Los Angeles Linen Slacks was trying to hustle her into bed so he could go back home and tell all his friends on Rodeo Drive that he’d gotten himself a little piece of the cheese up there in Wisconsin, where the air was rare and the legs were long and strong. But that hadn’t been it at all. He had been
listening,
and finally she had told him what he needed to hear.
    Yeah, shurr, people get funny ticks when they’re drinking,
Janna had said.
There’s this one guy who starts doing this after a couple of belts.
She had pinched her nostrils together with the tips of her fingers . . . only with her hand turned around so the palm pointed out.
    Jack, still smiling easily, still sipping a club soda:
Always with the palm out? Like this?
And mimicked the gesture.
    Janna, smiling, half in love:
That’s it, doll—you’re a quick study.
    Jack:
Sometimes, I guess. What’s this fella’s name, darlin’?
    Janna:
Kinderling. Thornberg Kinderling.
She giggled.
Only, after a drink or two—once he’s started up with that pinchy thing—he wants everyone to call him Thorny.
    Jack, still with his own smile:
And does he drink Bombay gin, darlin’? One ice cube, little trace of bitters?
    Janna’s smile starting to fade, now looking at him as if he might be some kind of wizard:
How’d you know that?
    But how he knew it didn’t matter, because that was really the whole package, done up in a neat bow. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.
    Eventually, Jack had flown back to Los Angeles with Thornberg Kinderling in custody—Thornberg Kinderling, just an inoffensive, bespectacled farm-insurance salesman from Centralia, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, wouldn’t dare ask your mamma for a drink of water on a hot day, but he had killed two prostitutes in the City of Angels. No strangulation for Thorny; he had done his work with a Buck knife, which Dale himself had eventually traced to Lapham Sporting Goods, the nasty little trading post a door down from the Sand Bar, Centralia’s grungiest drinking establishment.
    By then DNA testing had nailed Kinderling’s ass to the barn door, but Jack had been glad to have the provenance of the murder weapon anyway. He had called Dale personally to thank him, and Dale, who’d never been west of Denver in his life, had been almost absurdly touched by the courtesy. Jack had said several times during the course of the investigation that you could never have enough evidence when the doer was a genuine bad guy, and Thorny Kinderling had turned out to be about as bad as you could want. He’d gone the insanity route, of course, and Dale—who had privately hoped he might be called upon to testify—was delighted when the jury rejected the plea and sentenced him to consecutive life terms.
    And what made all that happen? What had been the first cause? Why, a man listening. That was all. Listening to a lady bartender who was used to having her breasts stared at while her words most commonly went in one ear of the man doing the staring and out the other. And who had Hollywood Jack listened to before he had listened to Janna Massengale? Some Sunset Strip hooker, it seemed . . . or more likely a whole bunch of them. (
What would you call that, anyway?
Dale wonders absently as he goes out to the garage to get his trusty hose.
A shimmy of streetwalkers? A strut of hookers?
) None of them could have picked Thornberg Kinderling out of a lineup, because the Thornberg who visited L.A. surely